School Holiday Ideas


The holidays are a chance to spend time together. Below are some suggestions of things to do at home to encourage learning and practising of skills and knowledge. Remember the Papatoetoe Library is a great place to visit, and it's free to join.

  • Encourage talking about their day, what they are playing, what happened in the TV programme they watched, etc.
  • Read stories to your child, read together, tell a make believe story together taking turns to add the next part
  • Do some baking/cooking together - an opportunity to learn about measurement
  • Washing/drying the dishes - how many spoons can you dry, how many cups...
  • Helping with the laundry - count the clothes hung out, count the pegs by 2's
  • Practice reading the time - we have been learning how to read hour times
  • Play a board game, play a card game, dice games - roll 2 dice and add the numbers together, see how many doubles you can roll
  • Look through the newspaper, find interesting pictures, talk about them. You could cut pictures out and stick them in a scrapbook and write a sentence underneath
  • Cut letters out of magazines and make words
  • Play 'I Spy' and 'Hangman'
  • Play 'I'm thinking of a number' - take turns at choosing a number, then you ask questions like is it bigger than 5? Is it smaller than 18?. You answer yes or no, and you are only allowed one guess at what the number is
  • With outside chalk draw pictures, draw patterns, draw and play hopscotch
  • Have paper and pencils/felts available for writing and drawing
  • Rhyming word challenge - each person takes turn saying a word that rhymes until they can think of no more. For example cat, bat, hat...look, book, took...wet, get, net...big, wig, tig...